GingerNinja.net

I’ve been using iTunes for ages, in fact since before I even owned an iPod as I really liked the widgets in Konfabulator (as was) and AveDesk which were predominately related to iTunes and I always intended to eventually get an iPod anyway as I didn’t really like Windows based media players. And yes, I’ll admit it, I was also sucked in by the whole coolness of iPod.

Today, however, I started to play with the View menu for the first time and discovered some options that I didn’t even know were there. It all started when Jo announced that she wanted to get all her album’s into iTunes on her profile as she was going to purchase an 80GB iPod and iTrip so she had everything in the car. When I was mucking around with setting it all up, I found the MiniStore option in iTunes and quite liked it. As it was disabled on my profile, I had to hunt to find it and then I stumbled across something wonderful…..Album View and Cover Flow View.

For those of you who just had a WTF? reaction the same as I, here are some screenshots. The blue bit at the bottom of the screen is the MniStore in action, giving me recommendations based on what I am looking at:

The normal, default List View:

The rather cool Album View which groups the List View in a much nicer manner in my opinion:

The very gorgeous Cover Flow View in normal browser mode….

….and in full-screen mode:

In Cover Flow View, you can either use the scrollbar to move through your selection or mouse click on the album you want to scroll through it. Love the reflections and the immediate tactility of it all, much nicer than Windows MCE if you ask me. In a cannot see the woods for the trees kind of way, these are not only available from the View menu but also the three buttons immediately to the left of the search box. How on earth did I miss these up until now?

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